Geminare Adds Services To Iron Mountain's LiveVault Cloud

Iron Mountain, which last month said it would shutter its public storage cloud, has signed an OEM contract with Geminare under which customers of Iron Mountain's LiveVault online data protection service can use Geminare's value-added cloud storage services.

Under the new relationship, customers of Iron Mountain's LiveVault service can take advantage of one of two disaster recovery technologies from Geminare, said Joshua Geist, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Geminare.

The first is Cloud Recovery for LiveVault, which offers real-time replication of mission-critical data and applications to virtual servers in the cloud, Geist said. It handles the backing up of data, and uses continual data protection (CDP) to keep the backups up-to-date. Should customers experience a planned or unplanned system outage, they can continue operations, he said.

The other is Virtual Server Rapid Recovery for LiveVault, which provides faster recovery to stand-by, restore-ready virtual servers in a cloud for customers who use their own data protection software, he said.

"We've had users who lost connectivity to their SAN and not realize they were running on virtual machines," he said. "This kind of performance is done via our Virtual Network Operations Center offering which automatically monitors the virtual machines, sends out alerts about changes, does reports, and offers a full view of the virtual machines."

The new Iron Mountain partnership is the latest OEM relationship for Geminare, which also counts Nexus, Quest, CA, and Hosting.com as cloud storage partners.

The new partnership also indicates that Iron Mountain, which last month surprised cloud storage watchers by closing its public storage cloud offerings, is still active in the market with its LiveVault service.

However, Iron Mountain also said that its other cloud storage businesses, including LiveVault and Connected Backup, will remain available to customers.

Iron Mountain's LiveVault service, based on its 2005 acquisition of LiveVault, is a cloud-based backup and recovery service. Connected Backup for PC is a service which backs up and protects data from all of a customer's PCs.

Geist said he is confident that Iron Mountain's LiveVault service will continue to be available far into the foreseeable future whether it remains a part of that company or is someday spun out.

"There's an extremely large number of customers using it," he said. "Regardless of whether it remains part of Iron Mountain or not, it will be the same service."

Solution providers looking to provide cloud-based protection for customers can work with Iron Mountain or any other Geminare partners to provide the value-added services of Cloud Recovery or Virtual Server Rapid Recovery, Geist said.

"We will continue to see the commoditization of cloud compute services, and it can be hard for VARs to add value on their own," he said. "But they can leverage technology like Cloud Recovery or Virtual Server Rapid Recovery to add value."